Product description

The extraordinary #1 "New York Times" bestseller that will be in movie theaters on November 15, 2013, Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist-books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of "I Am the Messenger, " has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

Author information

Markus Zusak is the author of I Am the Messenger, a Printz Honor Book and "Los Angeles Times" Book Award Finalist, and the international bestseller, "The Book Thief, " which has been translated into over thirty languages and has sold nine million copies around the world. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and children.

Customer reviews

The Book Thief is one of those books that deserves the praise it receives. It may seem that the subject matter has been covered countless times before, but it never ceases to disturb and shock the system. The Holocaust is given a human face by Mark Zusak in the form of a sweet little girl. Leisel's love of books weaves throughout the story and allows the reader to follow her development as she learns more and more each day about both reading and the increasingly violent world building up around her. The characters of Papa, Mama, Max and Rudy will endear you to this hauntingly sweet novel about the resilience of innocence in a world of evil. Amazingly narrated by Death himself which helps to constantly bring you back to the reality of where and when this book is set and the awful events to come. A beautiful novel that will stay with you.

Review quote

"Brilliant and hugely ambitious...Some will argue that a book so difficult and sad may not be appropriate for teenage readers...Adults will probably like it (this one did), but it's a great young-adult novel...It's the kind of book that can be life-changing, because without ever denying the essential amorality and randomness of the natural order, "The Book Thief" offers us a believable hard-won hope...The hope we see in Liesel is unassailable, the kind you can hang on to in the midst of poverty and war and violence. Young readers need such alternatives to ideological rigidity, and such explorations of how stories matter. And so, come to think of it, do adults." -"New York Times, "May 14, 2006
""The Book Thief" is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but "The Book Thief" deserves a place on the same shelf with "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's "Night." It seems poised to become a classic."
- "USA Today"
"Zusak doesn't sugarcoat anything, but he makes his ostensibly gloomy subject bearable the same way Kurt Vonnegut did in "Slaughterhouse-Five" with grim, darkly consoling humor."
- "Time Magazine"
"Elegant, philosophical and moving...Beautiful and important."
- "Kirkus Reviews," Starred
"This hefty volume is an achievement...a challenging book in both length
and subject..."
- "Publisher's Weekly," Starred
"One of the most highly anticipated young-adult books in years."
- "The Wall Street Journal"
"Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour
de force to be not just read but inhabited."
- "The Horn Book Magazine," Starred
"An extraordinary narrative."
- "School Library Journal," Starred
""The Book Thief" will be appr